Excursions & Visites DADA – 1st Visit: Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was an experimental artistic outing organized by the Paris Dadaists on 14 April 1921. Rather than a conventional guided tour, it was conceived as a performative walk and collective intervention in the urban landscape, challenging the established norms of art, tourism, and cultural experience.

The event was announced in a playful, subversive flyer designed by Tristan Tzara and signed by key Dada figures, including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Arp, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and others. The text mocked the traditional tourism industry and proposed excursions to “places that have no reason to exist,” rejecting picturesque, historical, or sentimental value in favor of banality, absurdity, and anti-art.

Participants assembled in the churchyard at 3 p.m., where Breton read a Dada manifesto and Ribemont-Dessaignes parodied the role of a tour guide by delivering arbitrary dictionary definitions as descriptions of ordinary sites. The performance playfully subverted expectations of both art and guided experiences — blurring poetry, chance operations, and social commentary with the everyday act of walking through the city.

Although rain dampened the planned “auction of abstractions” and improvised music, and only about fifty people took part, the excursion stands as an early example of walking as an artistic act — a move towards dissolving the boundary between daily life and creative exploration. Its legacy lies in how it invited people to look more closely at ordinary places, reconsider their assumptions, and engage with their surroundings in unexpected, playful ways.